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Fixing a Door Latch
By HomeAdditionPlus.com

Having a door that won't close properly or won't latch can be a real annoyance. Hi, my name is Mark Donovan from HomeAdditionPlus.com and today, I want to walk you through the steps of fixing your doors so that it will latch properly.

One of the first places to look to see why your door may not be latching properly is to make sure the hinge screws that are attached to the door frame are tight. A lot of times, if you use the door frequently, the hinges will loosen up and the door will lean a little bit such that it would not latch properly.

The second area to check on why a door may not be latching properly is the strike plate itself. We can see right here a line that indicates where the latch is touching the strike plate just below the whole of the strike plate. I also noticed that there is some wood, the portion of the wood frame that sits higher up than the latch strike plate opening. So what we can do here is we can mill out or drill out or chisel out this piece of wood to see if the door will then latch properly. If not, the next thing we will need to do is chisel out a little bit here and shift the latch plate down an eighth of an inch.

Because the latch on the door was just missing the bottom edge of the strike plate, I chose to use a drill with a drillbit and round up the bottom section of the whole on the strike plate. With any luck, the door should latch properly.

Now that we have drilled out the bottom edge of the strike plate, I am going to try shutting the door to see if it latches properly now. And yes, it looks like it is closing correctly at this point.

So in our second attempt trying to solve the latch, we found a solution. In our second solution of trying to resolve a door that would not latch, we were successful by drilling out the bottom portion of the strike plate. If that had not worked, the next possible solution would have been to use a block of wood and a hammer and adjust the doorstop outward so that the door would actually latch close.

You have to be careful though in the term of solution. It depends on what type of door you have. In this particular case, we have a pre-hung door and this doorstop is not meant to move so you could not have applied this approach, a hammer and a block of wood on this type of a door.

If however you had a custom frame door built where the doorstop was put in as a final piece of trim in trimming out the door frame, then yes, you could adjust it. The reason for adjusting the doorstop is that sometimes, the door will warp over years and the warpage will cause the door not to hit the doorstop at the correct location such as the door latch. That is why we would want to shift the doorstop left or right here appropriately so that the door would latch. Again, in this case, it would not work. So fortunately, we were able to solve the problem by drilling out the hole.

So there you have it. That is how you fix the door that would not latch properly. Adjust the hinges, drill out the strike plate, or adjust the doorstop.

Thanks for watching. If you have any other home improvement questions, visit us at HomeAdditionPlus.com today.

Fixing a Door Latch By HomeAdditionPlus.com Having a door that won't close properly or won't latch can be a real annoyance. Hi, my name is Mark Donovan from HomeAdditionPlus.com and today, I want to walk you through the steps of fixing your doors so that it will latch properly. One of... click to read more